“Living Hell” follows on B’Tselem’s August 2024 report “Welcome to Hell.” Building on the extensive research and analysis carried out for the previous report, it provides updated figures and new testimonies from 21 Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in recent months, and draws on data from other Israeli and international human rights organizations. The updated information indicates that Israeli prisons continue to function as a network of torture camps for Palestinians, with the systematic abuse even more extensive than before. This includes physical and psychological abuse, inhuman conditions, deliberate starvation and denial of medical care, all of which has led to numerous deaths. Some witnesses also described undergoing or witnessing sexual violence and abuse. The transformation of prisons into a network of torture camps is part of the Israeli regime’s coordinated onslaught on Palestinian society, aimed at dismantling the Palestinian collective.

See also: Audit Finds Palestinian Inmates Face Starvation and Beatings in Israeli Prisons | Conditions have severely deteriorated since the start of the war in Gaza, according to Israeli public defenders report

Palestinians in Israeli jails face ‘conditions unfit for human beings,’ state agency says | The Public Defender’s Office finds widespread abuses against Palestinian detainees, including systematic violence, food deprivation, medical neglect, and insanitary conditions

Inspectors from the Public Defense Office who visited four prisons in 2024 documented seeing skeletal prisoners and witnessing physical evidence of beatings and medical neglect on the bodies of prisoners they interviewed.

The reports were made public after a year-long legal battle by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which filed a freedom of information request to gain access to the documents, after the Justice Ministry refused to release them.

The inspectors described the conditions in one prison they visited as “not fit to hold human beings,” and said of another that their findings showed “unnecessary and unjustified violence against prisoners” carried out “on a regular basis and on numerous occasions.”

‘I could not stay silent’: Palestinian prisoner tells of sexual abuse in Israeli jail | Sami al-Saei has defied social stigma to speak out about what a report calls a ‘grave pattern’ of sexual violence